| Original Message: Beads from Beijing |
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Back at home, sorting through my pictures from my trip to China.
I took a great number of pictures on the Panjiayuan market in Beijing. I wrote a bit about it a year ago when I visited it for the first time. It is a massive market of antiques, collectibles, jade, and miscellaneous junk and fakes.
It is quite a busy market, and attracts a range of different types of visitors, buyers and sellers. Very popular is jade, varying from huge boulders with little bits exposed to show the beauty of the stone, to cheap stone bangles. Second popular and unexpected item are walnuts. Men pick out the most special walnuts, with a specific shape. They try to match a perfect pair, and some people will spend hours going through them.
Generally what struck me about this market, just like last time, is the detail a lot of people look for in natural materials. Searching out the most perfect lines in a agate bead, the shape of a strand of beads from seeds or pods, or the exact matching colour on a piece of jade. Even with cheap items, people could spend a lot of timing picking exactly the right beads out of a huge pile. When it comes to glass beads, pretty much everything you see here is fake. It is mass produced, and made to look old in different ways. It was very educational for me to walk around all the different stalls selling the same beads, all reproductions. One seller would have them by the strand, making it pretty clear they were not original Warring State beads, others would keep them in a small glass container, in between so called precious antiques. As I said, I have taken many pictures, and will be showing quite a few. It gives a good insight to at least some of the current market in reproductions. Apart from some agate, cheap stone and some buddhist wood and seed beads, I did not buy anything at the market. I know little to nothing about original antique and ancient Chinese beads, let alone that I would be able to tell the difference between the real thing and a fake. I had a great time though, looking at all the different and colourful displays. The first pictures five you a general idea of what the market looks like. All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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